A few years ago it became possible, for the first time, for a foreigner to travel Siberia at will. This book describes Colin Thubron's 15,000 mile journey through this astonishing country - one twelfth of the land surface of the whole earth.
Up the great Yenisei River to the Arctic, into the mountains abutting mongolia, easward to the Amur, the Pacific and the abandoned Gulags of Kolyma, Colin Thubron journeyed by train, river and truck among the people most damaged by the collapse of Communism and the breakup of the Soviet Union.
Vivid, compassionate, underpinned with humour, this is the account of a people moving through the ruins of Communism into more private, diverse and often stranger worlds.
